Data storage systems commonly have one or more data storage media and one or more recording heads that read information from and write information to the data storage media. Data storage media may be magnetic storage media, optical storage media, etc. One technology for meeting a demand of increasing the recording density of magnetic recording is heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). In HAMR, information bits are recorded on a data storage medium at elevated temperatures. In one HAMR approach, a beam of light is condensed to an optical spot on the storage medium to heat a portion of the medium and thereby reduce a magnetic coercivity of the heated portion. Data is then written to the reduced coercivity region.